Kendrick Lamar Describes His Hometown

Like the fictional Yoknapatawpha County where writer William Faulkner set many of his stories, the rapper and lyricist Kendrick Lamar, who is nominated for seven Grammy Awards including album of the year, has populated his hometown of Compton with stories, plots, images and recollections that map the contours of his city.

Mixing fact and fiction with rhythm and sound, Lamar since his debut mixtape in 2009 has become South L.A.’s most crucial storyteller, and he’s harnessed the area’s most notable corridor, Rosecrans Avenue, in service of those narratives.

Whether on tracks including “Backseat Freestyle,” “Keisha’s Song (Her Pain)” or “Money Trees” or in the videos for his tracks “Compton State of Mind” (a riff on Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind), “King Kunta” and “i,” Lamar locates his creative world in the area in which he was raised.

“My section be on the west side of Compton Cali, champ / Where the killers posted on the corner like a letter stamp,” he raps to open on his ’09 track “Best Rapper Under 25,” as if introducing a new character to a reader.

Eight years and hundreds of millions of streams later he still had Compton on the brain when making “Damn.,” part of a career-long initiative to represent his city to the world.

“[E]verything was moving so fast. I didn’t know how to digest it,” Lamar said. “The best thing I did was go back to the city of Compton, to touch the people who I grew up with and tell them the stories of the people I met around the world.”